A Quote by T. S. Eliot

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

T. S. Eliot

Quote Topics

Experience Absolute Always Beyond Every Goes Itself Means Never Paradox Relative Somehow

Quote Author

T. S. Eliot
American - Poet
September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965

The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn't cut itself, fire doesn't burn itself, light doesn't illuminate itself. It's always an endless mystery to itself.

Alan Watts

Those wretches tainted with the error of Indifferentism and Modernism hold that dogmatic truth is not absolute, but relative: that is, that it must adapt itself to the varying necessities of the times and the varying dispositions of souls, since it is not contained in an unchangeable revelation, but is, by its very nature, meant to accommodate itself to the life of man.

Pope Pius XI

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

Flannery O'Connor

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Albert Schweitzer

Love is alone sufficient by itself, it pleases by itself and for it's own sake. It is itself a merit, and itself it's own recompense. It seeks neither cause, nor consequences beyond itself. It is its own fruit, its own object and usefulness. I love because I love you, I love that I may love.

Bernard of Clairvaux

Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love.

Thomas M. Disch

It was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to be itself, and wild enough to change itself while somehow staying altogether true.

Patrick Rothfuss

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.

Michel Foucault

We make assertions and denials of what is next to [the Divine Nature], but never of It, for It is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue of Its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial.

Pope Dionysius

"The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things.

Giordano Bruno

To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.

Leonard Cohen

Thus "phenomenology" means ???????????? ?? ????????? -- to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.

Martin Heidegger

Feminism without spirituality runs the risk of becoming what it rejects: an elitist ideology, arrogant, superficial and separatist, closed to everything but itself. Without a spiritual base that obligates it beyond itself, calls it out of itself for the sake of others, a pedagogical feminism turned in on itself can become just one more intellectual ghetto that the world doesn’t notice and doesn’t need.

Joan D. Chittister

Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.